Photo prompt provided by Jessica Haines.
The simplest of things
One of my most brilliant childhood memories waits in that wonderfully crisp and renewed time following the violence of a summer storm.
Any distant rumble sent my mother to the centre of our home, each flash of lightning, a harbinger of the gut trembling roll of thunder sure to follow. Oblivious to her fear, I would don my gumboots, pull on a rain jacket, just to keep mother happy, and wait for the rumble to grow distant and the last of the pelting rain to be blown out to sea. Then off I would run, down the washed-out gravel drive, towards that perfect dip in the road, where the all too briefly fleeing runoff pooled and swirled before bullying through the narrow drainage pipe leading to the neighbour’s dam.
As the receding flow eddied past my ankles I remember feeling as if the clearing sky and that all too fleeting burst of chilled water held all anyone could ever need to be happy.
By Sally-Ann Hodgekiss in response to
FFfAW Challenge-Week of January 31, 2017